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Category: Universities

Administrative Bloat, 2020 Edition

Let’s take a look at administrative bloat.  It’s been about four and a half years since we last did it: time for another look. Now, the typical story we hear about administrative bloat concerns the huge numbers of administrative and support staff (henceforth, “A&S Staff”) hired, in contrast to the ranks of the professoriate, which are constantly decimated by predatory managers and yadda yadda.  The second part of that is reasonably easy to de-bunk, as Statistics Canada actually publishes data

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February 18, 2020 2 Comments

A Closer Look at Gender Pay Gaps

Picking up on yesterday’s blog, let’s look more closely at the data on university gender and pay. In particular, we need to look at the underlying factors that cause pay disparities. Years of service is the most obvious single factor affecting average pay. Figure 1 shows the women’s share of the professoriate, by age.  Overall, 41% of the professoriate are women, but it skews much higher among younger (less well-paid) professors and much lower among older (more highly-paid) ones.  Figure 1:

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February 6, 2020 No Comments

More Fun with Faculty Salary Data

Morning all.  Yesterday I promised you more faculty data analysis, and I am going to start by looking at variation in pay by institution.  I’m going to be deliberately provocative by showing people the distribution of salaries at the level where they vary the most: full professorships.  Ready? Figure 1: Average Salaries of Full Professors by Institution (and yes, the X-axis is unreadable, do you know how many institutions there are in this country?), Canada, 2018-19 The point I want to underline

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February 5, 2020 2 Comments

Strategic Planning for Ambiguous Organizations

I have been doing a fair bit of strategic planning work recently and one mantra that people like repeating when it comes this kind of exercise is “we’re not like a business, so we can’t plan like a business”.  I get why people say this, but they’re wrong.  Or rather, they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. When people say that “universities aren’t businesses”, mostly what they are thinking is that universities aren’t interested in profit, per se.  But

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November 25, 2019 2 Comments

The Making of the Modern University

I have spent a godawful amount of time on planes this week, going to Malawi and back for a meeting concerning the African Centres of Excellence project.  It’s given me a lot of time to catch up on reading (two recommendations for African fiction: The Grub Hunter by Amir Tag Elser is good, but Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto is great).  But one book in particular I thought I should mention to y’all is The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the

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November 22, 2019 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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